Morbid Modern Industrialism: G. K. Chesterton

Title: The Everlasting Man

Author: G.K. Chesterton


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But there is a deeper fallacy besides this obvious fact; that men need
not live for food merely because they cannot live without food The truth
is that the thing most present to the mind of man is not the economic
machinery necessary to his existence; but rather that existence itself;
the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of
his general position in it. There is something that is nearer to him
than livelihood, and that is life. For once that he remembers exactly
what work produces his wages and exactly what wages produce his meals,
he reflects ten times that it is a fine day or it is a queer world, or
wonders whether life is worth living, or wonders whether marriage is a
failure, or is pleased and puzzled with his own children, or remembers
his own youth, or in any such fashion vaguely reviews the mysterious lot
of man. This is true of the majority even of the wage-slaves of our
morbid modern industrialism, which by its hideousness and in-humanity
has really forced the economic issue to the front. It is immeasurably
more true of the multitude of peasants or hunters or fishers who make up
the real mass of mankind.
….
The human unity with which I deal here is not to be confounded with this
modern industrial monotony and herding, which is rather a congestion
than a communion. It is a thing to which human groups left to
themselves, and even human individuals left to themselves, have
everywhere tended by an instinct that may truly be called human. Like
all healthy human things, it has varied very much within the limits of a
general character; for that is characteristic of everything belonging to
that ancient land of liberty that lies before and around the servile
industrial town. Industrialism actually boasts that its products are all
of one pattern; that men in Jamaica or Japan can break the same seal and
drink the same bad whiskey, that a man at the North Pole and another at
the South might recognise the same optimistic level on the same dubious
tinned salmon. But wine, the gift of gods to men, can vary with every
valley and every vineyard, can turn into a hundred wines without any
wine once reminding us of whiskey; and cheeses can change from county to
county without forgetting the difference between chalk and cheese. When
I am speaking of this thing, therefore, I am speaking of something that
doubtless includes very wide differences; nevertheless I will here
maintain that it is one thing.


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